Tertiary education online requires further study and thinking

Higher-education staff are among the most "wired" people in the world. The origin of the Internet in US military-related scientific research based in universities, and its quick spread across university departments meant that higher-education personnel were at the edge of the new technology. In many cases it has been staff who have pioneered the use of online education, persisting in arguing for quality delivery with interactivity. Australia’s strong tradition of distance education has encouraged higher-education institutions to continue to provide students with access to higher education away from the bricks-and-mortar campus. But is online learning the face of the future, or will it be, like distance education, simply one of a number of different learning environments from which students will package their own education?

Online learning has "arrived" in higher education at the same time as universities are being squeezed by reduced public funding with a resultant increase in the commercialisation and corporatisation of our universities. The convergence of communication and information technology and the emergence of "info-tainment" has also blurred the role that formal education plays in our society. As costs rise, and public funding falls, online education seems a way of educating more people for less cost. We need to evaluate such assumptions.

The first important question is: do our students want to learn online? Survey material from overseas suggests that while students are avid users of the web, they overwhelmingly desire a campus-based experience, particularly since many school leavers do not have the independent self-directed study skills and motivation required. Even among older students, preference is for face-to-face or mixed-mode education, and retention is higher where elements of the campus-based education are part of upgrading or extending qualifications.

Student interest in online study often reflects the competing demands of paid work and the inability of students to fit in with the campus timetable. Although much is made of access by disabled students, isolated students or students confined to home, there is little evidence that these groups will be the dominant users of online or multimedia-based education. Students have voiced their disquiet about being constituted as consumers and are also concerned about maintaining quality when universities see on-line learning as simply quick-fix cash. They have the right to expect that staff involved in the teaching-learning process will have high levels of competency and experience.

Just as in traditional distance education, success with online learning depends upon adequate levels of staff support and overcoming student isolation. Putting a course on the web does not guarantee that learning takes place, any more than a library on campus guarantees learning. Previous experiences of computer-based learning materials have made teaching staff cautious about the impact on critical thinking and the discursive nature of higher education. The immediacy of the web has also raised important issues for assessment procedures – a number of sites now offer student essays and notes for purchase, and there is a lack of confidence in the increasing tendency towards "cut and pastiche" student work.

Generating materials is also costly. One Australian university estimated that the production of 12 high-quality CD-ROMs for language training consumed 36,000 project team hours and cost $A3.3million. This does not include the need to update material in order to provide "state of the art" learning. A recent estimate by one of Australia’s leading distance education providers suggests that the cost of transferring an existing course onto the web is around $70,000 for a unit constituting 25% of a full-time student study load, without the high degree of interactivity online study demands. Finally, there is continual debate about the differences between information and knowledge. As one writer so aptly warned "Will the wise person of the future be someone who knows nothing but can find anything?"

Finally at a global level, there are concerns that increased use of online learning could actually exacerbate existing differentials between regions. E-learning and the "virtual" university depend upon high levels of connectivity among students and staff and the ability of universities to sustain high investment and maintenance expenditure. The digital divide is a real one, both across national borders and within affluent countries. It has been estimated that the Internet reached less than 2% of the world’s population in 1998. Even within the US, a digital divide remains – the Historically Black Colleges and Universities are lagging behind in offering students access to computing resources and in taking advantage of high-bandwidth technologies. Income and geography are powerful forces in determining the information rich and the information poor. As educators, we have a moral responsibility to ensure that old barriers to access are not replicated in cyberspace.

The profits from online learning will largely be repatriated back to first-world countries. The vast majority of Internet servers, web pages, information and education resources emanate from North America, and are in English. Little attention has been given to the needs of multilingual communication, and there has been only slow progress in developing effective cross-lingual search engines. In Asia, seen to be a key market for the export of education, concern is rising that exporting students and importing courses present a very real threat to student’s loss of identity, culture and family values. If we are to utilise new communications and information based technologies, then we need to develop ways of globalising without colonizing.

Issues For Staff

While higher-education staff are active users of the Web and Internet, and are keen to ensure that their students make the most of the online environment, they also have concerns about the importance of ensuring that online education is of the highest quality and is driven by similar academic standards to that of more traditional education modes. This is particularly important now, as IT and communication companies are seeking partnerships with universities to deliver online courses, taking them outside of university governance structures and locating them in the market.

To deliver online education, most universities usually need an IT partner to provide the technical platform, with responsibility for curriculum staying with the staff at the university. Other ventures, particularly those that are internationally based, are based on a different type of partnership – one that sees the private communications or IT company actually have control over the curriculum.

Impact on staff work

One of the main problems for staff comes from the "unbundling" of the academic role. Most courses are developed within team structures that separate curriculum development, materials design, learning support and assessment. Some institutions contract the work out to casual labour with little continuity and stability for the student. There are pedagogical concerns about separating the integrated teaching role of academic staff. Part of the quality assurance framework depends upon the teacher being involved at all levels – curriculum, delivery and assessment.

Of equal concern is the impact that these new technologies have on staff workloads, rising to dangerous levels as student/staff ratios continue to climb. Many staff report that it is expected that their courses will be placed online, that little if any training accompanies such expectations, and that time and space differentials attached to global Internet delivery have raised student demands for more immediate responses from staff. Our members at Central Queensland University continually raise problems in relating to students in Dubai who expect to speak with staff at 2-3am Australian time.

Intellectual property

University staff own the copyright attached to their course materials. In the on-line environment, these are easy to commodify once translated into packaged materials. Some university administrations assert that copyright should now be shared since university infrastructure and skills have been added to create the online course. Others encourage staff to sell or otherwise assign their copyright. Once bought, the university can do what it likes to the content, and controls returns to the academic. The University of Phoenix pays staff a flat fee for each video class with no royalties for a repeat or relayed broadcast. This contrasts with contract conditions in other industries, such as entertainment.

The TRIPS agreement binds WTO nations to ensure some standardization of intellectual property rights to facilitate trade in knowledge. Interestingly, while it calls upon member nations to observe the defence of copyright in literary and artistic works contained in the Bern convention, it makes an exception in the case of moral rights. Moral rights exist separate from ownership, and include the rights of the originator to be attributed, and to object to any distortion of his or her work that may have a detrimental impact on his or her honour and reputation. In an on-line environment, where teaching and learning materials are packaged and re-packaged for sale and their use is difficult to track, we may need to seek some international agreement on the moral rights of originators within the e-university.

Consortia partnerships

Higher education has long been internationalised – faculty links across the globe, often on a discipline basis, have nurtured intellectual work, fostered the broad public interest in research and sponsored staff and student exchanges. More recently, institutions have joined together to offer students across the world an opportunity to study online, choosing courses from among the many offered by a variety of consortia. From this perspective, such developments may have many positive advantages. However, not all such partnerships are in the public interest – rather the motive for some ventures seems to be to maximise profits, for both the universities involved and the private companies.

One such venture is Universitas 21 (U21), a consortium of 18 universities from Europe, North America, Asia and Australasia, that originally sought partnerships with News Limited and Microsoft, and is now close to finalising a deal with North American media giant Thomson Corporation. Australian universities involved are Melbourne, UNSW, and Queensland.

The U21 venture raises important issues about the new models of global delivery, and brings into focus the sharp end of the corporatisation of higher education. Under the proposed deal Thomson Corporation will be responsible for course design, content development, testing and assessment and student database management and translation. The universities will licence their "brand names", receiving money for allowing the crests of their institutions to be used by the new international institution. The universities are not selling their courses; rather it is their reputation that seems up for sale.

The venture uses a complicated companies structure to insulate U21 from public scrutiny. Academics are to be renamed as course developers, instructors and assessors and will be contracted by U21 Global through a tender process. U21 will be registered in Singapore where activities of trade unions are highly circumscribed. There has also been considerable concern over the likely dominance of the for-profit company, Thomson, in ownership of the new consortium. Initially, courses on offer will be postgraduate programs in e-commerce, business administration and information systems.

Little is known of the way intellectual property will be protected, nor can we be guaranteed that information as to the activities of U21 Global will be reported back to the university communities that are subsidising this for-profit venture. On a cost-benefit basis, the "public university" may be losing out.

Can Quality be maintained?

When institutions see online courses as a way forward in the current cash-strapped environment, we need to have confidence in quality assurance processes that will ensure that online courses meet academic standards expected by the student, employers and the community. Australia has a high-quality reputation, and our graduates are accepted in countries around the world. This reputation must be sustained in an online future.

Accreditation and quality processes lie with governments, government agencies or are specified in regional agreements for cross-accreditation. The new global online environment will attract new ventures aiming to cash in on the latest "for profit" industry, with, at times, questionable commitment to educational standards or to public accountability. Both overseas and here we have seen quite spectacular failures of firms involved in English teaching, postgraduate business administration areas, and early "virtual" universities. The Chronicle of Higher Education in the US urges caution towards education.com companies operating in a volatile share market.

In order to sustain the new online learning environment, staff, students and the community will need to have confidence in its quality. Staff can deliver quality online courses as part of a broad mix of learning environments, as long as adequate resources accompany these developments and the public interest is maintained.